The corpse-tenders fell, and their dying was not a sound, but a silence. A letting-go. The last acolyte slumped, Cassian's knife a dark flower blooming on his robe. In the new quiet, the only sound was the far-off plink… plink… of the Weeping Door—a stubborn heartbeat from a world already sealing itself shut behind them.
They stood in the wet aftermath, caught between the devouring pool and the archway. The light from it was wrong. Not the wall's sick glow, but thick, amber, like hardened honey. It breathed a scent of salt and crushed myrtle, of a shore no mortal had ever walked.
Rowan wiped his blade clean. The motion was a ritual, a man sealing a vow with blood. "We go. Through there."
"Stop."
Varik's voice was dry as a dead root snapping. He stepped from the mural's shadow, untouched. His milky eyes held the chamber's green light, seeing not them, but the shape of the story they were now inside. The poet's frenzy was burned away. What remained was the patient, terrible clarity of a scribe who has read the ending.
"You do not see," he said, and his words were stones dropped into a deep well. "That is not a door. It is the first knot in the thread. And you are the fingers that must untie it, or be bound by it."
Ezra felt the cut on his arm weep. His light was a weary sun, sinking beneath the horizon of his bones. "Silas. Where is he?"
"Where the thread leads," Varik said, his gaze on Ezra's blood as if it were spilled ink. "To the place where all patterns are made complete."
"Then we follow the thread," Rowan said, his voice the grind of stone on stone.
Varik shook his head, a slow, ancient movement. "You stand at the loom. This light… it is the first strand laid. It is Seraphine's question, woven into the air. You do not run from a weave. You must find your place in the pattern. Or you will be cut away."
Mara's voice was flint. "What pattern?"
"The oldest one." Varik looked at the amber light, and for a moment his face was naked with a shared agony. "If you love a thing, is the final proof to set it loose upon the wind? Or is it to weave it so tightly into your own tapestry that it can never be pulled free?" He turned back, his eyes like tombs. "Every step you take will be a stitch. Every turn, a choice of color. To reach the heart, where they are making a sacrifice of your gentle friend, you must first show you understand the design. And then… you must choose your own thread."
He was not guiding them. He was reading their doom.
"I did not follow you to be a hero," he said, simple as a sharpened blade. "I followed because you are the first true colors to touch this grey tapestry in a thousand years. The Keepers?" He glanced at the dead. "They choose only black. The color of possession. It is a simple pattern. I wish to see what picture your suffering paints."
Rowan's face was a helm of bronze, but his eyes burned. "You make us a tool."
"I make you a mirror," Varik whispered. "To see what a mortal heart looks like when it is held against the endless hunger of a god. I may point to the next knot. But only if your unraveling shows me a truth more beautiful than the Keeper's sterile ritual."
He looked to the arch, and his voice changed, falling into the rhythm of an old, dreadful song.
"First, you will meet the ghost of what you might have been. Not a monster. A perfect version. A you that never knew a broken bone, a betrayed trust, a lonely night. It will be whole. It will be you, as the Fates first imagined you on the spindle. To pass, you must look upon that wholeness and say: 'I choose my cracks. I choose my hunger. I choose the man I have become.'"
Kiva hugged herself, rocking slightly. She was listening with her soul, and the words were poisoning it.
"Second," Varik continued, his gaze distant, "you will walk into the cave of echoes. It will give back not lies, but your own truths. The exact sound of a promise breaking. The precise whisper of a name you failed. It will use your own voice to flay you. To pass, you must shout your name into the storm of ghosts, and make it a sword."
Cassian had gone so still he seemed carved from the same stone as the mural.
"Third, before the heart, you will find the statue. It will be the shape of the love you have always craved—silent, constant, asking nothing, needing nothing. A love that is a perfect, polished stone. To touch it is to become stone yourself, a companion in its eternal, silent garden. To pass, you must look at that cold peace and say: 'I choose the fire. I choose the risk. I choose the heart that can be broken.'"
Ezra's blood ran cold. "And Silas? What is his place in this weaving?"
Varik's eyes found his, and in them was a pity so profound it felt like a fist around Ezra's throat.
"Silas is the lamb on the altar of a love that forgot how to be gentle," he said, each word a weight. "The High Keeper believes he is claiming a prize for his dark kingdom. But the sickness here… it is older. It is the sickness of a love that watched its beloved walk away, day after day, and could not follow. A love that rooted itself to one spot and turned its face forever toward a vanishing sun, until the watching became a kind of starving, and the lover became only an open mouth shaped like a man."
He looked at each of them—Rowan's fierce loyalty, Nora's defiant spark, Ezra's guttering glow.
"She does not wish to kill you. She wishes you to stay. To become a fixed star in the constellation of her longing. Death here is a release. What she offers is to live forever as a memory in a mind that has gone mad with remembering."
He moved aside, a slender shadow against the warm, terrible light.
"The first thread is drawn. Go now, and weave your fate."
They stood on the edge of the tapestry. There was no plan, only the terrible, beautiful responsibility of the next stitch.
Rowan looked at them—his classmates , his companions, the ragged edges of his heart. He met Ezra's eyes, and in that look was an understanding older than language, truer than hope: Where you go, I go.
He turned, and without a word, stepped into the amber light. He did not disappear; he was woven into the pattern.
One by one, they followed, their threads pulled into the grand, terrible design.
Varik watched them go. He did not move.
When the last of their light was swallowed, he knelt by the black pool, which reflected nothing. Not even the void.
"Let it be a tragedy worthy of the loom," he murmured to the silent water, his voice thick with a hope that was itself a kind of curse. "Let it be true. Let it be beautiful. Let it hurt."